


( Oh, Lazarus ) How did your debts get paid

by Kat2107



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Emphasis on 'Idiots', Idiots in Love, Kylo Ren is smarter than he looks, M/M, and an underappreciated emotional disaster, awkward handjobs, but Hux loves him, massive hands, snoke is a bastard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-03 19:27:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6623260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat2107/pseuds/Kat2107
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So... Here we go, I guess?"<br/>Nonchalance was hard to fake , but the darkness of the cell worked in Hux's favor. Lucky for him, Ren lacked the subtlety to understand the finer nuances towards cynicism and fatalism.<br/>It was only a small consolation, albeit the only one Hux had. Trusting Snoke and his own importance in the grand scheme of things had been a fatal mistake, not foreseeing how he made the perfect scapegoat, unforgivable.</p><p>And unforgiven they were indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	( Oh, Lazarus ) How did your debts get paid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ValiantBarnes (Cimila)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cimila/gifts).



> I received the following prompts:
> 
> Kylo's sure Hux is up to something, so he's going to keep an eye on him. For Snoke, of course.  
> Something based of the plot of one of those cheesy Hallmark Movies.  
> My always prompt, which is just effing wreck them :)
> 
> I have no idea what a Hallmark movie is, but I can always do "effing wreck them"  
> So I wrecked them :D  
> I even managed to throw in some information gathering in the name of Snoke!  
> Yay!  
> Enjoy ;)

"So... Here we go, I guess?" Nonchalance was hard to fake , but the darkness of the cell worked in Hux's favor. Lucky for him, Ren lacked the subtlety to understand the finer nuances towards cynicism and fatalism. It was only a small consolation, albeit the only one Hux had. Trusting Snoke and his own importance in the grand scheme of things had been a fatal mistake, not foreseeing how he made the perfect scapegoat, unforgivable. 

And unforgiven they were indeed. 

The days in this pitch black cell, dragged out only to be tortured and washed by cruel hands and ice-cold water, had given him ample opportunity to feel every injury, every bruise and cut. It had given Hux the time he needed to meditate at length over the blessing of his broken ribs scraping over each other, to enjoy his shattered left hand and the deep bruises along his arms and legs down to his chafed wrists and ankles.

Ultimately, it had been his own fault, though he hadn't yet found what he could have done differently. Except not losing Starkiller, of course. Why Snoke punished him over Ren... 

Hux was dispensable. Even the best General could be replaced with enough time and effort. Ren couldn't.

That had been one of the reasons Hux had moved every available resource and risked his life to retrieve Ren from the remnants of the exploding planet. The other was his alone to know, his alone to take to his grave.

"I have come to ascertain your guilt." Ren ducked into the room, all absence of light and swirling robes, voice rough and, even without the mask, distorted and heavy. 

"My guilt?" Hux choked. "I'm in a cell, Ren. I have been beaten and kept in isolation for days. I don't think my guilt is up for discussion anymore."

Ren tilted his head, hidden from view under a hood; a formless glob of impenetrable darkness Hux would have recognized as him even if they had taken his eyes.

"We will see," he said and crossed the cell with two steps.

Hux had measured the room thrice over since his arrival at Snoke's fortress.

He hadn't even thought to question his orders to accompany the Knight onto the planet. Ren had been in a fragile state despite the bacta treatments, the wounds too fresh and his mind in turmoil. Hux had dutifully handed him over to the med droids and then gone and reported to yet another of the Supreme Leader's holograms. The hits and kicks of Snoke's personal guard that had greeted him had been unexpected, a testament of how much Hux had trusted the first of their order to just perceive and act on the truth. 

But someone needed to be blamed. Always.

"What guilt do you want, Ren?" 

Behind the Knight, the door slammed shut with finality. Hux flinched. 

"Starkiller is a glowing rock in the cold of space, as is the Hosnian system and with it, the Republic." This was something, a legacy, an endless infamy nobody could take away from Hux. "I know that you are too valuable to be executed, so spare me the sermon of determining guilt. We both know who is going to take the fall. We both know I am already..."

"Shut up." Ren's hand grabbed Hux's hair with a growl and stuffed the words back down his throat with a sharp backwards tug of Hux's head. "That's not it." 

Then Ren shoved in.

When Poe Dameron's screams had filtered with soul-crushing resonance through the door of interrogation room 4, Hux had spent his time philosophizing if Dameron's resistance was the reason for his agony or Kylo Ren's sadism. Now, as the rage crackling vortex of Ren's mind forced the entry into Hux's, he understood how much it didn't matter. Guilt or no guilt - and Hux had nothing to hide from Snoke - the walls went up and the fight began, with no conscious command from his own self. A violation this absolute could not be taken lying down.

He screamed. The fingers of both his hands grabbed Ren's robe and Hux screamed.

Memories were sifted and discarded. Arkanis. His father and mother. Cold comfort even on the darkest nights. Duty, always duty. A necessity to rise to receive the most minuscule of recognitions. Promotion to Captain, to Major, to General. The Finalizer. Starkiller. Ren. Dark and unforgiving with a terrible temperament and no boundaries, neither in power nor in personality. The shock of the first time seeing his face. The heat, the… Hux pushed. Once, twice, violently and the thought shifted.

Dameron. The satisfaction that had flooded Hux's mind when he had found out who they had in custody. The thrill of a challenge when the pilot hadn't broken. Dark pleasure at the screams. Silence. Hux pushed again, pushed harder to deflect Kylo Ren, but it was too late. 

Had Hux not assumed he was already sentenced, he might have recognized this particular tactic far earlier. Dameron they had kept only a day in suspension and pain to soften him, in a hurry to obtain the information. As it was, Hux had fought this battle with all the wrong premises and too late he understood that maybe he had something to hide after all.

Ren curled around him, around this memory with velvet dark amusement, with certainty. Mental fingers caressed that moment when Dameron fell silent and the door slid back and Hux came face to face with the man’s torturer.

Ren had such a peculiar way of stepping through doors, especially on ships. He always held his head a little bowed, like a man used to being the tallest and the one smaller people never considered when they designed the doorframes. An oddly charming habit, yet it lent Ren the silhouette of a charging bull whenever he entered a room. An impression only Hux seemed immune to. He was too busy being charmed.

No!

Ren's fingers clamped like a vice around Hux's head and from the distance of his own memory Hux felt tears stream down his face. Hot, ugly tears as company to the heaving sobs wrecking his ribs. Pain that weakened him instead of strengthening his resolve and his barriers as it should. Then he understood. With Ren in his mind, so intimately linked the pain wasn't Hux's alone. And Ren thrived on pain.

He had been high on it when he had stepped out of that interrogation room, every fiber in his body charged, crackling energy. An invisible storm under the impenetrable surface, fortifying a barrier built of chaos and entropy instead of Hux's cold control. Under the mask Hux had imagined flushed cheeks and plush lips parted with every slow exhale, dark eyes hungry and greedy. He had wondered if electricity skimmed over Ren's pale skin under the robe, if he would crackle if anybody dared touch him. Hux had wanted to.

Pushing weakly now against Ren's searching, razor-sharp mind, he heard a distant whimper that sounded like 'no' and a soft 'shhh' that wasn't his own.

"If the droid is on Jakku, we will soon have it," his memory voice had said, instead of allowing his thoughts to turn into an unbelievable stupidity, like a touch. He had dared a smile, though, an invitation, extended with all the futile hope of a much younger man. Ren had turned and walked away.

"No!" Hux screamed in a dark cell into the unforgiving wall of a roughly woven tunic. Battering at the intruder in his mind with all the rage of ash cold rejection and yet another night spent longing and hungry and full of anger at his own stupid, fallible, disgusting... 

"Hux!" and softer, "Hux."

Ren's fingers still curled around Hux's head, hairs caught between digits, but there was no longer a robe to catch his screams and soak up his tears like the hungry abyss Hux wished he'd fallen into.

"Hux..." A whisper. A thumb that brushed over Hux's cheekbone adorned with a loving cut put there by a needful gauntlet. "I..." 

There were arms when Hux didn't answer, arms that caught him with a curse and pushed at all the wrong places on his right shoulder blade. Still, they were nice.

"I thought you hated me," Kylo Ren whispered. "I thought I disgusted you." 

Hux laughed. Hid his tear stained face against Ren's neck and laughed. With madness rather than joy. 

Ren didn't seem to mind. His lips were warm as they brushed over the painfully vulnerable skin at Hux's temple, down that same cheekbone. Ren's glove cold fingers were gentle as they tilted Hux's face up, primed and positioned him for the last assault. The one to break him. Lips. Warm and sweet. Still faintly tasting of caf and sugar. Three spoonful. 

"I thought you hated me," Ren whispered, touching Hux not quite this time as if he waited. "I hated myself for it. For wanting. You are so fucking perfect Hux. And I am just..." 

With a sigh - his last wish, a man's last meal - Hux leaned in and tasted what he had imagined far too many times in darknesses just like this. Caf, yes. And sugar. That too. But also bread and the astringent sharpness of medicine.

Hux remembered Dameron's cries and the surge of sudden, power-fed hunger. He had gone to bed that night, dispatched the ground troops to Jakku and retreated for two hours of sleep. He had shoved a hand down his pants with painful urgency, flaming hot rejection still a brutal tidal wave in his blood, curling around the arousal in horrid mockery of his own helplessness. He had come, barely touching himself. Had choked on Ren's name and promised he would force the bloody man to look him into the eye and acknowledge him as an equal.

Hux didn't feel his broken hand when Kylo Ren gently unlatched it from the tunic. There was only a curious cold. He tasted a smile, though, on Ren's lips. On his tongue as it swept with a low moan into Hux's mouth, brushing the cut in his lip. Stopped. Whispered over damage skin once more to pick up the faint taste of blood.

"You stood in the hangar when I disembarked and you were coldest, most beautiful statue I had ever seen." Hux gave up on dignity when Ren's hand slid up his thigh and through the threadbare excuse of Hux's pants, drew a blazing trail up all the way to his cock. "I wondered. All the time. Where you long and elegant as you are in body? Thick? Or unremarkable? Beautiful? Surely beautiful." 

Ren tilted Hux's body to lie down, a hand at his neck to support his head, the other curiously curled around Hux's way too hard length. 

"Will you kill me as I come, Ren?" Hux smiled into the darkness. That would be a good way. Oh screw that, after a year of constant hunger, it was the only way to go.

"What?" Ren asked as if he were inclined to talk, yet still pulled down Hux's pants. "Are you mad? I'm not going to kill you."

"You should not defy the...oh...Supreme Leader. Yes. Like THIS." 

Ren's long fingers translated into powerful touch and no matter how big Hux was, be would always have been dwarfed by these paws. His left hand hit the wall behind his cot, still strangely numb. 

"I'm not." Ren's hands vanished. Cloth shifted, followed by a groan of dark relief. 

"Let me," Hux murmured into the dark at the same time Ren encircled his cock again, sans the gloves, and said: "He sent me to find out if you lowered the shields,"

"What? Stop, Ren. No. Kriff, yes." 

Somewhere in there or maybe in his mind Ren found enough of what he wanted to hear. Maybe all of it if his laugh was any indication. "You didn't. "

"Harder Ren," Hux hissed and blindly stretched his hand until he hit flesh. Hot. Big flesh, velvet soft under the spoiled brat's pads of his fingers. 

"No, I damn well didn’t," he gasped when the thought belatedly filtered through. “I was on the bridge the whole time in full view of my officers.”

Hux twisted, straining futilely against his body's drive to keep itself safe in the face of multiple rib fractures. Ren knew anyways and leaned in while his tightened fingers stroked in long languid strokes and fulfilled every urgent fantasy Hux had had in the last year. Hux's lips, smiling, hit Ren's. 

"Most of whom are dead,” Ren growled with a sharp bite of his teeth. “Someone framed you."

"Fuck!" Not even Hux knew if that was a curse at whomever or a blessing of Ren's hand. He pushed up his hips and tugged on Ren's cock with the uncoordinated movements of a green boy. Ren didn't mind.

"Would you like me to gift you their head, my general?" 

Hux came.

~…~

"It was Phasma," he spoke against Ren's chest, too boneless to protest being manhandled back into a proximate of presentable. "She had access to the shield generator codes." 

Ren's kiss was an answer. Something in Hux's jaw shifted as he gnashed his teeth. 

"We lost contact with her right before the attack. I thought she had been injured. I was worried." Hux had been happy when they located her signal, alive and relatively unscathed in a damaged shuttle, floating in space. He had had no way to talk to her then, too busy with keeping Ren alive. "She accused me, didn't she?"

"You will have her head before they let you out of the med bay, General." Kylo Ren picked him up effortlessly, Hux's injured arm safely tucked across his chest, every scrape kissed at least once, worshipped in the dark with a tenderness nobody believed Ren capable of. 

"Did you believe them?" Hux didn't want to know, but he had to. He needed to look ahead with clear eyes or he'd break on what lay behind. The answer was whispered into his hair, darkly and starkly honest, vulnerable as the Knight would not be again, once he walked out that door.

"Snoke sent me to kill you. I promised him I wouldn't need to."

Of course, Hux thought, shielding his oversensitive eyes against the punishing glow of the overhead lamps. 

"I can't believe they thought that anybody would survive to accuse you if you had been guilty." Someone gasped as they walked past, just close enough to have heard Ren. By noon, those words would have travelled once through the castle and further, to the Finalizer. 

_Aren’t you awfully clever_ , Hux thought with intent and was rewarded with the huff of an aborted laugh against his cheek. 

_Shhhh_ , the voice in his mind whispered. _I know what I'm doing._

It would be so easy to give in now, to let Ren take care of him and for once protect him. 

“Ren?” Hux spoke, admitting the truth of his continued survival, his unbroken will to the light of day. He didn’t speak loudly. “General?” Kylo Ren’s answer came just as soft, followed by a glance of dark eyes that seemed strangely warm in their gaze all of a sudden.

“Bring her alive.”

Kylo Ren smiled.


End file.
